For a significant percentage of the world's population, grocery shopping is an inevitable and time-consuming chore. Typically, a customer retrieves a shopping trolley (also referred to as a shopping “cart,” in some regions) at a store, and pushes the trolley up and down different aisles of the store in search of food, food-related or other items commonly found in supermarkets around the world (e.g., clothes, DIY (“do it yourself”) items, garden supplies, etc.). The customer may randomly roam the aisles in the hope of coming across items that he or she would like to purchase or, perhaps more commonly, may come to the store armed with a grocery list of items to buy. In the latter case, the customer may need to spend a considerable amount of time searching for items on the list, and/or may need to take the time to find and speak to a store employee for guidance.
When the customer does find a desired item, he or she picks up the item and places it in a basket of the trolley (e.g., the main compartment of the basket or, in some trolleys, a smaller, collapsible compartment near the handle), and proceeds to look for the next desired item. When the customer has finished and is ready to leave (e.g., after finding all food items on a grocery list), he or she typically pushes the trolley to a checkout area. This may be an area where a checkout attendant operates a register/terminal, for example, or may be a “self-checkout” payment station. In either case, queues of other customers can cause significant delays, especially at peak shopping times. If the customer goes to an attended checkout lane, he or she typically must take all items out of the trolley basket, and place them on a conveyor (or possibly a counter) to allow the attendant to scan bar codes on the items. Alternatively, if the customer goes to a self-checkout lane or area, he or she must personally scan each item, and place each scanned item in a bag in a designated area equipped with a weight sensor (for security purposes, to ensure that the item weight matches its expected weight). Either one of these procedures (i.e., regular/attended checkout or self-checkout) can cause a significant amount of additional delay, beyond that discussed above. Quite often, customers end up putting in far more effort, and spending far more time, at the grocery store than they would expect, leading to general dissatisfaction.
Similar sources of delay and dissatisfaction can occur in other retail shopping contexts, such as when shopping in so-called “big-box” stores (e.g., department stores), or any other type of store that utilizes conventional shopping trolleys and checkout procedures.